I have met the space limitations of my router, so I thought I should extend it.

I have bought an usb pendrive, and I did a little research. Luckily OpenWrt supports space extension of the router. There are many ways of doing that. There is an overlay directory on the router, which can be used for extending the filesystem.

As you can see our main goal is “A place where two programmers share their experiences with the world about Robotics and AI programming.”. But you can ask the question if that is our purpose, how are these posts related to robotics?
Let’s go back to the roots, what is robotics? What is robotics exactly? As I think there are many aspect for this word. The best one I think is, a robot is a tool which helps to automate our daily routines or our human related works.

Here we ask ourselves what do we want to automate? There will be many answer for this question. Just like, I want a car like K.I.T.T. which will help my drive and be the sidekick for me in my daily life. I know it is very perv, but I wanted to give a hint what kind of robot you can think of.

We have a car which we want to automate and give him an AI and special abilities, like vision and spoken human communication.(more…)

I wanted to extend the storage space of the router so I used my old Kingston pendrive.
That is the point when I want to mention, it is very easy to do. Yet even I got stuck at some point.
Firstly you need some packages,
kmod-usb-core , for the core usb
kmod-usb-uhci or kmod-usb-ohci this depends on what kind of usb driver your router has. There won’t be a problem if you install both.
kmod-usb-storage for the storage drive
kmod-usb2 for usb 2 support
kmod-fs-ext3 | kmod-fs-vfat for the filesystem. I used kmod-fs-vfat my pendrive is formatted to this fs.(more…)

This is the post what we forgot to write :]. So who are we?
First I would like to introduce my friend Bence Magyar, he is a university student at ELTE (HU university), and he is learning computer science. And myself, I graduated as a programmer at the DE (HU university too).
We started to learn robotics, when we bought two NXTs. Our first project was a wall follower bot. Next summer he met an evil engineer and our project had been boosted. First we started to think in more electronics related things, second to make a good bot, we used a router. It is a cheap and easy way to make an wireless bot. Thats why we are posting things about OpenWRT and routers. OpenCV is more robotics related, and Bence is learning it now, I also want to learn image processing if I have time.
Our goal is to make robots, that will reach space and explore it. We have some robot projects ongoing, one is to make four rover and do some swarm technology.
Also we went to a robotic competition in our country, it’s called Hungarians On Mars ( or Magyarok a Marson in HU). The project files and documents can be found here.
We also have a robot working team, that’s called Buggers. You can see it’s the logo at the top.
Our goal with this blog to share our way of robotics, and help other people who stuck with the same problem.

We have an OpenWRT OS on our router, so what should we do now? Of course we want to create our program and run it on the OpenWRT. So Let’s get started.
First we need a developer platform or an SDK. I used my PC with Ubuntu for that.
Second we have to download the SDK that’s suit for us. What kind of SDK we need? It depends on the hardware that we use for running the OpenWRT. I have two OpenWRT compatible router the first is a Linksys WRT54GL, second is a WRT160NL. They have different architecture but that’s not a big problem.
The WRT54GL have Broadcom BCM5352, so I use brcm-2.4 .(more…)